Logo Assignment
As you work toward the creation of your professional websites due at the mid-term, on Mar.16, you'll be thinking a lot about how you want to present yourself visually on the Web. Often our first impulse for self-representation is to choose a photo of ourselves, but visuals do not have to incoporate photographic images. In online and other environments, we might represent ourselves iconically, with an avatar, a symbol, sometimes just a letter.
Your task in this assignment is to create a "logo" for yourself using the skills you've been acquiring in Photoshop. Think carefully about your professional audience and the kind of "image" you want to portray to them. For this assignment it will be important to use your abstract and associative thinking to think about how you want to represent yourself, and then craft a "brand" that reflects the ideas you want to communicate about yourself.
The logo you create should be appropriate for a professional audience, but it should also communicate something unique about you. Big corporations spend a lot of money to invent and protect their logos, and you should think about yours just as seriously. I encourage you to have fun, because you want to make a lasting, memorable visual impression. It should have good contrast, and you should choose colors carefully.
The goal of this assignment is to enable you to combine your critical, visual literacy skills and your technical, Photoshop skills to generate something that might get included on your individual, professional webpage. Although I won't require you to actually use your logo on your professional site, you are welcome to do so. You'll be presenting your Photoshopped logos to the class on Tues. Feb. 27 and Fri. Mar. 2. in your presentations, which should be no more than 5-7 minutes. You'll receive feedback from your peers, and have a chance to explain the rhetorical choices you made and the ideas you hoped to convey visually in the image you generated.
Tips
Brainstorm a bit about your professional audience. Who are the potential employers you hope to reach? What are their fields of expertise? What kinds of qualities might they value in a job candidate? How can you visually represent those qualities? Are there field-specific experiences or ideas you have and want to highlight? What are the things about yourself that you most value? How many are appropriate to present to a professional audience? How might you visually represent these qualities?
How to get started
Your creative juices are the limit here. I encourage you to play around a bit before you commit to a single metaphor or image. You might want to take some photos using a digital camera and then play around with them in Photoshop--you can cut, paste, modify, "fake." If you don't have access to a digital camera, let me know and we can arrange for you to borrow one. Also, you can use the class wiki to share ideas.
You might want to check some of the following sites for inspiration:
This site will help you find images and colors
Good luck and have fun!